Chapter 52

Even if Fei Du had lost his mind, gone drag-racing downtown, and been personally hauled back to a little dark room by Luo Wenzhou, that still would have sounded more normal than what he'd just said.

Luo Wenzhou's temples throbbed incessantly. His overloaded CPU, just cooled down a little, once again showed signs of bursting into flames.—Enrolled in April. However rich and overbearing Fei Du was, whatever doors were open to him, he still must have started preparing for this last year.

Why?

Had he suddenly woken up enthralled by academia? Did he have an acute case of nothing better to do? Was it to pursue Tao Ran? Or had he suddenly found that he'd grown weary of his world filled with the stench of profits?

Just then, perhaps because it was rather crowded downstairs, a photograph was accidentally knocked out of the hand of a middle-aged woman. She hastily reached out to grab it, but a wind blew past, tumbling the old photo paper away. This was clearly an insignificant little accident, but to a person with sufficiently sensitive, weakened nerves, it seemed like a mystical hint of something. The woman collapsed, stumbling to her knees and beginning to bawl.

The sound of crying, hoarse but rising with penetrating force, pierced through the cracks in the corridor's window. Meanwhile, amidst this unsettling clamor, a technician from the forensics department trotted over. "Captain Luo, the analysis results have come in on the specimen you delivered yesterday. The blood on the cloth is Qu Tong's!"

Luo Wenzhou took a deep breath, looked at Fei Du for a while, then wordlessly went towards Director Lu's office.

Twenty minutes later, Fei Du, holding two cartons of ice cream, walked into the room temporarily being used to hold Su Luozhan. He put the cartons on a little table. "Do you want some? Which one?"

Su Luozhan looked at him, hesitating a moment, then pointed to the strawberry one.

Fei Du left her the strawberry, taking the other carton himself. He got his earbuds and phone out of his pocket, opened a livestream of a basketball game, crossed his legs, and watched while he ate, ignoring her.

The two sat in mutual silence for a while. At first Su Luozhan was calm, not making any eye-contact with him. When she'd eaten half the ice cream and found the other party showed no signs of speaking, she finally couldn't resist giving Fei Du a look on her own initiative. Her gaze swept over Fei Du's shirt and phone, finally falling on his wrist laying on the table.

Her head tilted, Su Luozhan considered his watch for a moment, then gently tapped the floor twice with the tip of her foot. "Is your watch real?"

Fei Du may not have heard; he made no response.

Su Luozhan waited a while, then reached a finger across the table and lightly tapped twice on the side of his phone.

Finally alerted, Fei Du pulled out one earbud. "Yes, what is it?"

The volume on his phone was very loud. In the quiet room, you could hear the shouting of the commentator leaking out of the earbud.

Su Luozhan bit a corner of her plastic spoon. "What are you doing here? Aren't you going to question me?"

"Oh, my colleagues are busy, they made me come over to keep an eye on you." Fei Du seemed unwilling to tear himself away from the screen. He spared her only a second's glance before turning back to the game, answering very absently.

When others asked her this and that, this girl would play the fool; but when others weren't interested in her, she seemed to feel dissatisfied.

At first Su Luozhan looked at Fei Du from time to time. When she finished her ice cream, she simply stared at him, voluntarily opening a conversation. "Are you also with the police?"

"A trainee," Fei Du answered indolently.

"Are trainees very rich?" Su Luozhan raised her brows in a very adult fashion. "Your watch looks pretty expensive. Is it the real deal, or a quality fake?"

Fei Du seemed to think her words were very funny. First he raised his brows in astonishment; then he spoke, unable to hold back a smile. "You know what a 'quality fake' is? Little girl, who taught you that?"

Su Luozhan's expression hardened at once, clearly affronted by his disrespectful attitude of teasing a small child.

She remembered this man with the wounded left arm. At the old Su residence, he'd also treated her like this. It seemed like he didn't believe that she could do anything, and didn't believe she could pose any threat, either.

Finding you'd successfully practiced a deception would generally cause satisfaction. But this satisfaction couldn't endure, because in "acting the swine to eat the tiger," the important point was generally to "eat the tiger." There was no pleasure in always acting the swine, especially when people treated you like one.

Su Luozhan bit her lip, carefully assessing whether he really wasn't interested in her or whether he was only putting it on. After a while, she couldn't resist half-seriously throwing out some bait. She answered, "Those uncles taught me."

Fei Du paused, but he didn't ask her, "Which uncles?" He only very pityingly, with some placating perfunctoriness, said to her, "It'll be all right now, rest assured."

This manner made Su Luozhan feel like she'd put a foot wrong going downstairs. She couldn't resist following up, "You mean I'll be all right?"

"I mean, there won't be anymore bad guys hurting you. As for the question of how to deal with you now, we'll have to see, although the problem isn't serious, and you're still young. You won't have to bear criminal responsibility. I would guess you'll be taken into care." Fei Du thought about it, then finally paused his damned basketball game, seeming to remember his "police" duties. He opened his beautiful peach blossom eyes wide, but out of his mouth came a string of clichés addressed to the girl: "You children have no self-awareness. You get used by people and don't know what's happened. Child, the past is past. When you get out, you have to study hard, not think of these messy things anymore. The road ahead of you is still long…"

Tao Ran had taken advantage of their mutual delays to take a nap in front of the surveillance feed. He'd just woken up when he heard this string and hastily rubbed his eyes. "Heavens, that's Fei Du… With this long-windedness, I thought you were possessing him!"

Luo Wenzhou kicked his chair.

Tao Ran used this opportunity to stand up and clear his head. He rubbed his face and bent an ear to the interminable harangue on the surveillance feed for a moment. Then he smiled. "Recently you two haven't been arguing. It's pretty good."

"What is there to argue about?"

"Who knows?" Tao Ran laughed. "Didn't your fur bristle at the sight of each other at the Flower Market District Sub-Bureau's gates? Didn't you fight it out all the way back? And you had them give him a parking ticket."

Luo Wenzhou: "…"

"I told you all along." Tao Ran sighed, as before habitually playing peacemaker. "Fei Du's really all right. If you're a little nice to him, he'll quietly pay it back to you tenfold. He may run off at the mouth sometimes, but he'll rarely haggle over anything for real. Otherwise he wouldn't have let it go so easily when that sports car of his got smashed up."

Having spoken, Tao Ran prepared for Luo Wenzhou to respond with a sneer; but instead, after a while, Luo Wenzhou hadn't said anything. He even gave a brief, "Yeah."

Tao Ran: "…"

What had been happening on earth lately? How come every time he opened his eyes, it was a different world!

Just then, on the surveillance feed, Su Luozhan abruptly stood up and pressed forward, almost sitting on the little table, using her body language to interrupt Fei Du's ideological education.

"Do you think they just used me?" Su Luozhan asked quietly.

"Xu Wenchao has been arrested and brought to justice," Fei Du said sternly. "Although there are still questions that haven't been settled, we should soon be able to get it out of him."

Su Luozhan laughed mysteriously.

"If you're willing to identify him, then of course…" At this point, Fei Du deliberately paused, then shook his head and smiled. "Never mind, what would be the use of you identifying him?—Do you want to eat something else? I can send someone to buy it."

Su Luozhan wasn't interested in this. She followed up, "Why would it be no use for me to identify him?"

"Because you're a child," Fei Du said matter-of-factly. "Children can't bear witness. This is a case of a very serious nature. They won't take what you say as the truth, and if they did, they still couldn't make you go to court.—But, little girl, there's one point I have to talk to you about. However scared you are, hurting other children is still wrong. You were holding a knife back there. Do you know how dangerous that was? If you'd slipped up…"

Su Luozhan suddenly interrupted him: "If I'd slipped up, I wouldn't have been able to kill her?"

Fei Du looked at her, seeming dazed.

Su Luozhan twirled the hair at her temple around her finger again and again, looking at him with a smile that wasn't quite a smile. She was like a hunter who'd thrown out some bait and was waiting for the prey to take it.

Fei Du became "solemn," putting down his phone and sitting up properly, looking at Su Luozhan. "I know that for some children who have been hurt, it can be hard to accept themselves as victims. You may mistakenly think that only the bad guys are strong, only the bad guys are capable, and victims are all weak and stupid and deserve what they get. You may even blindly emulate those people who do bad things, but…"

"Victims are weak and stupid and deserve what they get." Su Luozhan pulled a face at him. "They're like sheep. All they can do is bleat, slow and foolish. Easily tricked, scream at a touch, die just like that. They're of no value alive."

Fei Du furrowed his brow, staring at Su Luozhan in mixed shock and anger. "How could you think that!"

From the time he'd taken her for a stupid child and tried to "educate" her, there had been a vicious restlessness in Su Luozhan's heart; she'd have loved nothing better than to rip open his gentle face. Seeing his expression change now, the restlessness was at last slightly alleviated, and she felt a bit of indescribable, unwarranted pleasure.

"Anyway, I won't be sentenced to jail no matter what, right?" Su Luozhan looked at Fei Du complacently. "Those sheep really are very foolish. They believe anything you say. If you get near them once, the second time they'll think you're their friend and go with you anywhere you want… Haha, it's so funny it kills me."

"Su Luozhan." Fei Du's lips trembled faintly. "Don't talk nonsense!"

Su Luozhan hadn't had a chance to see Qu Tong's parents' expressions when they'd received the recording; it was all imagination. She'd felt an unbearable itch, and now grafted this young "policeman"'s pained and disturbed expression onto the vision. She was so excited her eyes glowed.

"I'm not talking nonsense." She innocently and artlessly kicked the floor gently with the tip of her foot. "This is what my mom taught me. She said that when other animals encounter danger, they'll either fight or flee. Only little sheep are different. They'll only get scared out of their wits, stay where they are without moving a muscle. They'll go with anyone who calls them. Though my mom was also a sheep, also very foolish. I read her diary in secret. She got scared out of her wits when she was the same age as me, and afterwards she never dared to leave her signature again."

"…signature?" said Fei Du.

Su Luozhan very cleverly mimicked a telephone receiver with her hand and put it next to her ear. "The 'knight' protecting her died, so she didn't dare anymore."

"Knight?"

"Too sickening, right?" Su Luozhan laughed scornfully. "In fact he was just a 'diner' she was on good terms with, that's all. My family lives by hunting. Aside from catching 'little sheep,' my mom couldn't do anything. Then she got old and couldn't even attend to business. She had to rely on me to support herself… Well, she finally died."

"…that's enough. Don't say any more," Fei Du said with difficulty. "How old are you?"

"I knew how to do it when I was seven." Su Luozhan happily pursed her lips in a smile at him. "My mom used me to catch little sheep to entertain the clients. Sometimes she'd have me go 'hunting' with a client. When he'd finished his meal, he'd go back home, and she'd take care of the rest, no need for the client to worry about it. That's the business she learned from her mother."

In front of the surveillance feed, Luo Wenzhou stood up. "Go investigate Su Xiaolan's drunkard mom!"

Hearing this order, Lang Qiao, who'd just come in, ran back out without a look back.

All the drowsiness in Tao Ran's body vanished without a trace. "What does that mean? Is the child saying that Su Xiaolan's mother made her living pimping underaged prostitutes, and Wu Guangchuan was only her client? Also, why is it that she didn't say a word when we questioned her, but Fei Du didn't even ask and she insisted on saying it herself?"

"You treated her as a suspect, acting like the police," Luo Wenzhou said quietly, gaze fixed on the screen. "Fei Du treated her as an 'innocent child,' acting like a 'parent,' so she subconsciously wanted to send him a 'recording.'"

The reason only Fei Du had been able to get her to talk wasn't that he had a wealth of experience being a troubled young person; it was that only Fei Du had used the "proper" manner when capturing Su Luozhan.

"Impossible." Fei Du stood up at once, accidentally bumping the little table. It gave a thunk and heavily settled back on the floor. "The killer then was Wu Guangchuan, and Wu Guangchuan was stabbed to death by a victim's family member. Afterwards, there weren't any more…"

At this point, he abruptly paused, suddenly opening his eyes wide as if he'd thought of something frightening.

"You didn't know about it, that's all." Su Luozhan was enjoying his expression. "Though that uncle really had nothing to complain about. My mom loved him, but he was a great scum. He wasn't satisfied just having my mom. He also liked the stupid sheep. She was so jealous she was about to go mad, so she invented a 'fun' sort of signature."

"Do you have the same kind of relationship with Xu Wenchao?" said Fei Du.

"No way!" Su Luozhan cried out in displeasure. Scornfully, she said, "What is he? Is he worthy? He's a part-time janitor at best!"

Fei Du suddenly raised his voice. "Then why did you want to send the recording to Qu Tong's parents!"

Su Luozhan smiled cheekily with her arms pressed to her sides.

"It was fun," she said.

"Boss! Su Xiaolan's mother was called Su Hui. She worked a little when she was young, then the place she worked at closed down. She was unemployed, stayed home and developed an alcohol addiction. She operated a 'gaming hall' that had a second-hand truck!"